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O'Brien's Going after CacciatoVera P. Froelich aa Bryant CollegePublished online: 09 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Vera P. Froelich (1995) O'Brien's Going after Cacciato, TheExplicator, 53:3, 181-183, DOI: 10.1080/00144940.1995.9937274

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attention of another waitress, who asks Doreen who this “joker” is, “anyway” (52). Doreen’s response: “ ‘He’s a salesman. He’s my husband’ ”(52).

-JOHN MAGEE, Ohio Northern University

WORKS CITED

Campbell, Ewing. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers,

Carver, Raymond. Where I ’m Calling From. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989. 1992.

O’Brien’s GOING AFTER CACCIATO

It is generally recognized that Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cucciuto, the winner of the National Book Award for 1978, is most likely the best novel of the Vietnam War, albeit an unusual one in that it innovatively combines experiential realism of war with surrealism, primarily implemented in the fantasy journey of escape by the novel’s protagonist, thoughtful and sympa- thetic soldier Paul Berlin. The first chapter in this novel is of more than us- ual importance. Designed to be a self-sufficient story (McCaffery 137) and often anthologized as such, this chapter is crucial to the novel in that it not only introduces us to the characters and the situation but also sets the tenor of the novel and reveals its author’s view of this war in relation to which all else in the novel must be judged.

In this chapter, the plot of the entire novel is defined: A very young soldier named Cacciato deserts, intending to walk by land to Paris. As his squad- amused but increasingly intrigued, even inspired-follows under orders to capture him, Paul Berlin begins his liberating mind-journey of “going after Cacciato,” of escape from, and later also a reexamination of, the reality of war. But what is defined first, in the first two pages to be exact, is this war reality and its cost to the young American soldiers involved. These pages list for us those who have died, in action and otherwise (one through “fragging,” we later find), and those who have been maimed, at times through self-injury, underscoring the urgency of the desire to live. These pages also vividly delin- eate for us the daily miseries and sufferings of this war, from incessant rain and mud to dysentery and rotting flesh, from monotony and hopelessness and fear to a lack of sense of any larger purpose for which lives might be justifi- ably given, or lost. And the young soldiers undergo all this while being “led” by an ill, alcoholic, misanthropic lieutenant who cannot even remember who

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among his young charges is who, or who alive and who dead-so much for the nature of military authority in Vietnam.

These beginning pages contain another and quite different image of destruction, which helps to make this somber portrait of the Vietnam War more complete. We are told that Berlin and his squad are using a nearly mined Buddhist pagoda for their housing:

. . .in shadows was the cross-legged Buddha, smiling from its elevated stone perch. The pagoda was cold. Dank from a month of rain, the place smelled of clays and silicates and dope and old incense. It was a single square room built like a pillbox with stone walls and a flat ceiling that forced the men to stoop or kneel. Once it might have been a fine house of worship, but now it was junk. Sandbags blocked the windows. Bits of bro- ken pottery lay under chipped pedestals. The buddha’s right arm was miss- ing but the smile was intact. Head cocked, the statue seemed interested in the lieutenant’s long sigh. (O’Brien 4)

In this very American novel, which focuses on the American soldiers’ experi- ences, feelings, and minds,’ and in which Vietnam is presented primarily as merely a terrain and a climate, this image of the pagoda seems to be symbol- ic of the country of Vietnam at this time. Invaded, desecrated, nearly destroyed, it still endured, sustained by a culture and a spirituality against which the war and the American warriors seem unimportant and small.

Some critics have thought that Going After Cacciato is “not an antiwar novel” (Vannatta 246; McCaffery 145), but surely they must be mistaken. If, as many have observed, in this novel O’Brien seems much preoccupied with memory and especially with imagination, probing its power and scope as well as its limitations, it is nevertheles the horror of the wartime situation that gives imagination its urgency, its desperate importance. And if at the end of the novel Paul Berlin finds he must return and resign himself to the war reality, he makes clear to us that he does so not because of “courage” (Bates 278) or prin- ciple but because, like his creator, he cannot withstand the societal pressures of family and country and is afraid of the isolation and hardship that opposi- tion to them would impose (322-23)2-an understandable but hardly an admirable or a happy ending.

As for O’Brien himself, he has frequently said that war is a complex affair, especially for those who must face it directly, but his prevalent views have become increasingly explicit. For instance, shortly after this novel was pub- lished, he said that his main concern in it was “to have readers care about what’s right and wrong and about the difficulty of doing right, the difficulty of saying no to a war” (qtd. in Schroeder 146). Several years later, speaking at the Asia Society conference in 1985, he was even more forthright: “Would- n’t all of us admit that a mistake was made in Vietnam?. . . we misunderstood Vietnamese history . . . and we were shooting anyway” (qtd. in Lomperis 73).

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Both the novel and its author condemn this war. And it is in this novel’s first, crucial chapter that such views are most clearly embodied, molding all the rest.

-VERA P. FROELICH, Bryant College

NOTES

1. In fact, nearly all the American literature on the Vietnam War seems ethnocentric, as empha- sized by the 1985 conference of the Asia Society, which included many jouranlists and writers such as O’Brien. Those attending saw in this literature, “the Vietnamese as the great lost fact of the war” (Lomperis 5). while Lomperis called the Vietnam War literature “an exercise in Ameri- can cultural narcissism. . .” (63).

2. There are other resemblances between OBrien and Paul Berlin. For instance, they are both from the Midwest, and OBrien, initially a McCarthy anti-war activist, also thought of deserting when first drafted (McCaffery 130, 132-3).

WORKS CITED

Bates, Milton J. “Tim OBrien’s Myth of Courage.” Modern Fiction Studies 33.2 (summer 1987):

Lornperis, Timothy J. “Reading the Wind”: The Literature of the Vietnam War. Durham: Duke

McCaffery, Larry. “Interview with Tim O’Brien.” Chicago Review 33.2 (1982): 12949. Schroeder, Eric James. “Two Interviews: Talks with Tim O’Brien and Robert Stone.” Modern Fic-

Vannatta, Dennis. “Theme and Structure in Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cucciato.” Modem Fic-

263-79.

UP, 1987.

tion Studies 30.1 (spring 1984): 135-64.

rion Studies 28.2 (summer 1982): 242-6.

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